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Mr. Straw: Fewer problems.

Sir Brian Mawhinney: --whether fewer problems are associated with PR. I once read somewhere:

"I have not been persuaded that under PR"

one does not

"end up with a disproportionate power being wielded by small parties. There is no perfect electoral system. Each has its problems and I simply do not believe that the problems"

one gets

"with PR are less than those"

one gets

"with the existing system."

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I see that the Home Secretary agrees with that statement. It is a good job that he does, because they are not my words but those of the Prime Minister, who uttered those words only a couple of years ago, making it clear that he is quite unimpressed with PR and with the argument that PR provides a system with fewer problems than our current system.

Mr. Straw: I have been following the right hon. Gentleman's speech with care; he is making an important argument. Does he accept that there is a profound difference between the Parliaments that he has described, which are national Parliaments elected to determine a Government, and a European Parliament that in no sense forms--or should form--a Government, and that is wholly and solely a representative body?

Sir Brian Mawhinney: We are talking about the election of public representatives--that is the fundamental issue--which is a feature that is shared by the European Parliament and the House. As hon. Members and the Home Secretary know, the great unspoken aspect of the debate is that this Bill is but a dry run for another Bill which will eventually emerge, stating that the Government have decided to change the method of election to the House.

At the risk of upsetting traditionalists, I shall depart for a moment from the normal confrontational tone of our debates in the House and pay a genuine tribute to the Home Secretary. It was courageous and typically honest of him to state quite openly what he has stated frequently in the past, and what all hon. Members know to be true: when it comes to elections to the House, he has no great love of any form of proportional representation. Hon. Members will remember that fact, which I do not mention in any aggressive sense. I pay tribute to him.

I pay even greater tribute to the Home Secretary because of the nature of the Government. To understand the Government, one must understand two matters. The first is that the Government are determined to be re-elected--for the first time--for a second term, which is in itself a perfectly honourable objective, although it becomes much less honourable if the Government resort to changing the goalposts to achieve it.

The second thing that one must understand about the Government is that their driving emotion is a strong dislike--I shall be diplomatic in my phraseology--for Conservatives. Ministers are perfectly happy to link up with any other party with which they think they can do business, on this or any other issue, permanently to disadvantage the Conservative party. That is a perfectly obvious motivation for the Labour party, and it is why everyone understands that the Bill is but a dry run for what will come later. We will have to proceed on that understanding.

Mr. Beith: I should like to understand two aspects of the Conservatives' position. The first is why they accepted a treaty obligation to have an electoral system forEurope that is based on common principles, including proportionality. The second is why they have retained for all these years the single transferable vote system of proportional representation in Northern Ireland.

Sir Brian Mawhinney: I was about to deal with that point. My hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash)

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raised a point on article 138(3). I remind the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) that, although that was a treaty obligation--we signed the treaty and took on the obligation--it was one that was subject to unanimity. That aspect of the treaty was as important to us as the treaty obligation itself. I think that he will grant us that, over the years, we have consistently maintained that view.

The Home Secretary made an important point on unanimity. Thus far, because of the need for unanimity, we have not gone along towards a single unified electoral system in Europe. The Bill is a major step in that direction, as he himself acknowledged in his speech. Will he reassure the House that we will not move from any electoral system towards a harmonised European one without the House deciding on such a move and thereby legitimising it?

Mr. Beith: What about Northern Ireland?

Sir Brian Mawhinney: If I may, I will return to that matter.

Why are we considering the Bill when we know that the Prime Minister is not in favour of proportional representation? Who was pushing for it when the Prime Minister was against it? The answer is obvious--it was the right hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Ashdown), who realised that he and the Liberal Democrats would never be elected to govern. He realised that he had one thing in common with the Prime Minister and the Minister without Portfolio--a willingness to enter into any deal to do down Tories.

The right hon. Member for Yeovil was willing to contemplate any secret deal to achieve that aim, and that is what he and the Government did. Off into a secret room they went--probably, given the favourite genre of the Labour party, a smoke-filled room--and did a secret deal. We still have no idea what the deal was, except that it gave the right hon. Gentleman a seat at the Cabinet table, for an hour every two or three weeks, in return for a commitment to help pass legislation that he and the Prime Minister thought would be to their political advantage and to the political disadvantage of the Conservative party. We shall see.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. George Howarth): The right hon. Gentleman is off on a flight of fancy, and I am loth to interrupt him. He accused my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister of having dreamt up the scheme, as if it has come out of the ether. I presume that he has read the House of Commons research paper on the Bill. Does he acknowledge that, on page 17, it quotes my right hon. Friend's party conference speech, of 30 September 1993? My right hon. Friend, then shadow Home Secretary, said:

"We will reform the voting system for the European Parliament".

Does the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman accept that there was some precedent for my right hon. Friend's decision on the subject?

Sir Brian Mawhinney: I do not want to upset the Minister too much, but the quotation that I gave from the Prime Minister post-dated the one that he has given the House. Mine was from 1994.

Mr. Howarth: For reasons that I well understand, the right hon. Gentleman is confusing arguments about

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PR systems for electing a Westminster Parliament with those for electing Members of the European Parliament, which is what the Bill covers. If he checks the quotation that he mentioned, he will find that it refers to the Westminster Parliament.

Sir Brian Mawhinney: I am grateful to the Minister and to the Home Secretary because it has emerged from the debate so far--and we have been going for only an hour and 20 minutes--that the Labour party is perhaps moving further away from reforming elections to this House. That is a helpful development and I hope that it will continue. The Minister accused me of flights of fancy, but it is not a flight of fancy to say that the leadership of the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party met in secret and did deals on this country's constitution. That is a matter of record and we are now starting to see the results of those deals.

Dr. Tony Wright: May I put it to the right hon. Gentleman that the reason why he is having so much difficulty--and attacking a Bill that does not exist to avoid discussing a Bill that does--is that he does not understand what is going on? The examples that he has given--one party having a civilised discussion with another to improve a measure, and a Home Secretary who accepts arguments about improvements to the Bill to improve voter choice--are examples of the sort of politics that people want. The politics that he is giving us are those that people wanted to boot out.

Sir Brian Mawhinney: I shall assume from that that the hon. Gentleman is giving me a gentle rebuke and asking me to get on with my speech about the Bill. I shall be happy to move on to demonstrate its inadequacies to him.

The Bill will sever the direct link between the constituency and the Member. For the first time it will prevent the electors having a direct vote for their representatives. No one should be in any doubt about the fundamental changes in the Bill. It will break the constituency basis of British elections. It will break the individual basis of British elections, and it will break the democratic basis of British elections. It is not new democracy, new young Britain or new modern voting: it is new cynical political control, undreamt of by old Labour.

Let us examine the Bill. Constituencies will go and European-style regions will be in. In future, as the Home Secretary said, Members of the European Parliament will represent, say, Scotland or London, as if those were homogeneous areas. What do Swindon and Land's End by way of the Scilly Isles have as a unifying feature? That is to be a region. Hon. Members will have noticed that the regions are an amalgam of urban and rural areas. Given the Government's record, we all know that the urban voice will prevail at the expense of the rural voice. Who will argue the case for inner London or the west of Scotland? Who will argue the case for minority views in those huge regions? How can Members feel a sense of ownership of their regions or identify with them?

Those of us who spend time, as I suspect most of us do, talking to Members of the European Parliament will know that they are already frequently criticised by their electors for not being seen around. Given the size of their constituencies, they have to spread themselves thinly over a large area. That is already a source of irritation for the

25 Nov 1997 : Column 822

electors, but how much worse will it be when Members of the European Parliament have to cover a region that stretches from Oxford and Milton Keynes, via Portsmouth and Cowes, to Dover? The job will be impossible in any terms that we, as elected representatives, understand our job.

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